Funerals for Horses (retail)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  I grabbed onto Harley Mike’s towel, because he was big, and I knew that he would fight to the death to protect me. His presence formed a shield, like the chemical coating on a fire eater’s tongue, and I juggled raw fire with my bare hands, because he was close by. I touched their attention and ran.

  I saw only one woman, but she disappeared into a room with the man she’d come with, just the two of them, and Queenie told me that was a “ventilated” room, and when I just stared, he said there were holes in the walls of some rooms, some crotch height, some eye level, and the guys could watch, or push something in there with them, and hope it might be touched. He said most of the women who come to a place like this only tease.

  We sat in the jacuzzi, and men filled it almost to overflowing and leaned against its outsides, trying to catch my eye and smiling at me with faces that said please, please pick me. You just don’t know how important it is.

  But I picked no one—the boys did the picking. They chose two young men with dark Latino looks, and nodded to them, and we strolled to a room with no “ventilation” because Harley Mike thought it would be kinder, since I had no intention of touching them, or letting them touch me, if no one knew what they got, or what they didn’t.

  No sooner did they step in with us than Harley Mike bolted the door from inside, and held them back with a hand on each of their bare chests, and explained in a voice difficult to challenge, “The lady prefers to just watch.”

  I saw their disappointment, but they stayed.

  I sat in the corner as they writhed on the stained mattress, and I watched the tangled combinations of mouths and erections, and fixed balloons of nitrous oxide, the way I’d been taught, using Queenie’s special “hitter,” and passed them to the boys, and now and then breathed one myself. It made the world sway and dip, and contain only the dark sounds of Darth Vader breathing, and the click of wet contact, and the warm buzzing of a fire eater who doesn’t feel the burn. I liked it too much. All of it, not just the drug.

  The second time out the boys chose a gorgeous blond man with an attitude problem, who said that wasn’t the deal he thought he’d bought himself into, and tried to pull off my towel. Harley Mike hooked a gigantic forearm around his neck, and pulled him off me, and slammed him into the back of the door. And when he came up swinging, Harley Mike hit the man so hard his head whipped around ninety degrees, and we heard a crack. Mike caught him before he could fall, and left him on the sticky mattress, his eyes struggling to focus, blood and saliva running from the corner of his mouth.

  After that we got dressed to go, without talking.

  In the car Harley Mike told Eddie it was a stupid idea to begin with, and he should apologize to me, but I said it was okay, he didn’t have to. It was my idea as much as anybody’s, because I was just so tired of pretending I could avoid growing up like my father.

  Shane was out by the pool when we got home, and we sat out in the cool night, which made me feel cleaner, and he let me take hits off his cigarette. I didn’t ask him why he wasn’t at work, because I knew it meant that he and Jason had had a fight.

  Shane said he’d heard rumors about me, that I was quite the party girl, and I mustn’t let anybody talk me into anything, unless it was something I really wanted to do. He said there were a lot of good men in this place, but maybe Eddie and Paul were just kids, no offense to people my age, and maybe they just hadn’t burned off all their wildness yet.

  I thought maybe I hadn’t either, but I didn’t say so.

  Jason stumbled through from the parking lot then, and we heard the car that had dropped him spin away, and he picked a drunken path to the stairs, where he clung to the railing and shot a look over his shoulder. Shane forgot to say goodbye to me before following him up.

  When I got inside I found Simon sitting close to Sarah on the couch, and he excused himself without looking at me, saying he wanted to go sit by the pool. Sarah stayed inside with me, which seemed strange.

  “He’s worried about you,” she said.

  “So worried he can’t even look at me?” I took a Coke out of the refrigerator and drank out of the bottle, knowing this was a lecture, and had been rehearsed.

  “It’s hard for Simon to talk about sex. He thought it might be better if I did.”

  “Nothing to talk about,” I said, flopping on the couch with her. “I’ve never had sex. I don’t plan on it.”

  Sarah nodded and joined Simon by the pool, and I went to bed without seeing either one of them again that night.

  In the morning I told Willie everything.

  “You know,” she said, “you don’t have to be like anyone else, even if you’re related to them.”

  “What do you mean?” I knew what she meant.

  She wore a rose corsage that day, and a red bow pulling back her hair. “Your mother has mental problems, but you don’t have to. You can have a healthy view of sex, even if your father doesn’t.”

  And then there’s my sister DeeDee, I thought, and I thought of how I’d promised Simon I wouldn’t follow in her footsteps. It was still a meaningless promise, though, because I couldn’t remember what she’d done that I shouldn’t.

  “So, who do I be like?”

  “Well, ideally Ella, but if you need a model for the time being, you could be a little like Simon.”

  “Really? What’s Simon like?”

  Willie suggested that I draw a portrait of Simon, not necessarily realistic, but one that would express the way I see him.

  I brought it in later to show her, a curved line, a featureless silhouette, like the outline of Hitchcock before he stepped into it at the beginning of each show.

  A shadow, independent of any mass that might have cast it.

  How could I be more like that than I already was?

  DANCING HORSE

  We walk half the night, then sleep half the day. We try to set out again, but we don’t get far.

  The mesa rises like a dream. I guess it’s about two miles away. I need to reach it, to touch it, to know for sure it’s not a mirage, and won’t vanish.

  But as fifty miles seemed a thousand without Yozzy in my charge, or me in hers, two miles is now fifty. Yozzy stumbles, lands on her knees and, instead of righting herself, folds up underneath me.

  I stand, hold her reins and ask her to her feet, but she fixes me with her bottomless dark eyes, the only liquid for miles. She says, as clearly as an old woman with a voice, if I could go a step farther, I would have.

  I remove her hackamore and blanket, sit cross-legged on the ground and hold her head in my lap. I tell her she needs only to rest, and she tolerates the lie. She needs both rest and water, and her needs are in conflict, because water will not walk to us.

  I throw the blanket across my back, extending out over my head, and I bend over her, become her awning, her shade. From the shoulders down, her body bakes in the sun—but what can I do about that? I consider covering her with my sleeping bag, but I’m afraid to seal in too much of her own body heat.

  I am doing all I can.

  She will rest all day, all night maybe, or even the next day, and then we will walk again. This is what I tell her.

  At nightfall I decide I must find water. Even enough to fill my hat might bring her to her feet. How far I can walk, I don’t know. Which way will I go? I rise and stumble slowly northeast, and a scream stops me in my tracks. It’s Yozzy, calling me back. I listen to her advice, because my own ideas feel indistinct.

  As I walk back I hear the shrill, restless yips of distant coyotes, so at least I know now why I mustn’t leave her side. I bring her a big double handful of dry grass, but she only sniffs it and lays her head down.

  The stars come out and the coyotes circle; the bright moon shows their numbers, but also their cowardice. I stand over my Yozzy, and swing the leather hackamore by its reins, and they cluster close, but run, yelping, when touched by even the air of my swing. Close up their faces are narrow and pinched, their eyes cool. They sit a handful of yards away a
nd bark their frustration.

  In the morning I sleep and Yozzy sits guard over me.

  Then it’s the heat of a day again, and the mesa fills my horizon, my eyes; it’s close now, but not real. I can’t touch it.

  Yozzy ’s skin feels brittle, inflexible, but her eyes remain clear and dark. Knowing. Trusting. Not in me, so much. Well, maybe in me. Maybe in us.

  When I close my eyes I fall into feverish delusions, in which Sam Roanhorse is wrong, Yozzy is wrong, and every element in the universe lines up at my face, against me. Then the strangest delusion of all, that the sun is gone, the sky dark, the air dark, the wind cool, and I remove the blanket to make it go away, to stop teasing me. It is not a delusion. The sky is a mass of dark clouds, the summer air painted black underneath. I look up into this beauty, feel a heavy drop hit my cheekbone and splash into my eye.

  I laugh.

  In the Navajo tradition, Everett taught me, there are two kinds of rain: She-rain, which mists gently down, nourishes the crops, seeps into the land, replenishes; and He-rain, which thunders away the delicate seeds, floods the washes, destroys.

  The rain pours down so hard that Yozzy winces, and we laugh, though only I can be heard, at least by me. After all, Yozzy and I are not seedlings. We are old trees with deep roots. We will not wash away.

  I tilt my head back and open my mouth, and as I do I cup my hands, and when they fill with rain, Yozzy licks the water away. I take off my hat, turn it upside down, and in just a moment it’s half full.

  I give its contents to my friend. Our gift flows into my eyes, soaks through my clothes to the skin.

  Yozzy rises to her feet and shakes. She picks her way to a seam in the land, a gully, dry just moments ago, which now runs with a trickle of water. She walks her front legs down in, stands with her haunches jutting upward at an odd angle, and drinks.

  She is not a beautiful horse, I realize; or rather, she wouldn’t be, if she weren’t the most beautiful animal in the world to me. I see her now for her true age, an ancient old woman, and I realize I have asked too much.

  While she takes her fill, I drink a whole hatful of rain, and when she comes back to me again, we dance.

  I swing from side to side, ignoring my stiffness, my painful feet. Ignoring all but my partner. She rears, plays games in the air with her hooves. Tosses her head in a pattern which I can see we both find pleasing.

  Then I sit, as if come to my senses, and she nuzzles my ear. You’re right, she says, what a foolish way to spend energy, but she expresses this without regret.

  Shivering now, dripping in the downpour, eyes squinted against its fury, we walk the two miles to the mesa, side by side.

  I touch it.

  It’s real.

  THEN:

  For three weeks prior to my eighteenth birthday, I reminded Shane every time I saw him.

  “I got the night off and everything,” he’d say. “You and me, kid.”

  The promise was that Shane would take me dancing, just the two of us, ride us to Gino’s on the back of his motorcycle. Our night. It would be our night. It would make up for the eighteen years that came before it, just that one night. It had to. What else were we given?

  I bleached my hair blond, like Jason did, and sliced up the knees of my jeans, and washed them until they frayed, and rolled the sleeves of the baggy white T-shirt Shane had given me.

  I leaned on his motorcycle, dreaming, until almost nine-thirty, then I gave up and knocked on his door. At first I got no answer at all, but on the second knock, a muffled sound.

  “Yeah?”

  “Shane?”

  “It’s open.”

  He perched on the couch, leaned forward on his hands, his hair in his eyes, a cigarette between his fingers. The smoke curled over the top of his head and disappeared.

  His apartment felt too bare. Pictures were missing from walls, a statue from the table. The bookcase stood empty.

  On the table in front of him I saw a bottle of Scotch and a twin-edged razor blade.

  He lifted his head to reveal red, swollen eyes, and took a pull from the bottle.

  “Oh, Ella,” he said, more disappointed in himself than I could ever be in him. “I’m sorry, Ella.”

  I sat with him on the couch, close, and wrapped an arm around his knee. He said Jason was gone.

  “Gone gone?”

  “Looks that way.”

  I leaned my head on his shoulder and told him not to cry.

  “Your big day,” he said.

  “This is better than dancing, anyway.” And it was, pressed up against him on the couch, making him feel better by understanding, by postponing feeling hurt until he was done hurting.

  He took another drink, and I took the bottle out of his hand and had a long swallow myself, and felt the burn of it going down, the way it made my muscles loose and fuzzy, all along my arms and legs. I wrapped my arms around his waist and he held me close, with his cheek on the top of my head. His tears fell into my hair.

  “Ella, don’t fall in love with me,” he said at last, and my stomach burned to hear the words, because I would have done anything for Shane, anything at all. Why did he have to ask the one thing I couldn’t do if I tried? “Find yourself a nice straight guy, a guy who’ll be all the things you want him to be.” He stroked my hair, his voice mellowed with drink and pain into a sort of spoken song. “You have so much love, Ella—don’t throw it away on a guy like me.”

  But until I met Shane I thought I had no love at all.

  “Too late,” I said, because it was the only thing that fit, and rang true, and my voice cracked when I said it, almost like crying, but without the help of my eyes.

  He held me so tight around the ribs that I couldn’t breathe all the way in, and I didn’t care.

  I kissed him on the mouth, and he kissed me back.

  Then he stood up, and I thought he’d ask me to leave, but he took my hand and pulled me into the almost bare bedroom, and pulled off his T-shirt, and smiled in a way that made him look sadder.

  He reached for my shirt and I lifted my arms for him. As he pulled it over my head, I smiled back at him. It came all the way from a place that could feel, and I thought it would break me, or that it did, and when I was still able to reach for him I was so surprised.

  We just hugged each other for the longest time, with my breasts pressed up against his bare chest. He rocked me a little, like slow-dancing, and I didn’t know or care if we would ever do more. I remember thinking I could die right then and it wouldn’t have mattered one way or the other.

  He walked me backwards to the bed, and laid me down, and I raised my hips for him; he pulled my jeans away, threw them on the floor, took off his own before he lay down on top of me with a lazy half-erection.

  I could see his face in the light from the living room, his hair falling from his forehead, touching mine, and I thought, this must be what it feels like to love someone, and if Simon feels this way for Sarah, then he should have her, and nobody should ever get in the way.

  When Shane kissed me again I tasted cigarettes and Scotch, and a trace of his sweat; and when his face brushed against mine, I felt the stubble of his whiskers burn my cheek.

  I told him I loved him and he just smiled. “Big mistake,” he said. Then he pushed inside me. I yelled out in pain and surprise, but I would do it all again if I could. I don’t think he knew why I yelled.

  He rocked me slowly, like we had all night, his eyes still swollen, his face ruined in the half-light. Every thrust brought pain and reawakened the pain of the moment before, and I never wanted him to stop, but in time he did.

  He lay still with a little shudder, and as he pulled away I saw the shock on his face. I looked down to see the sheet soaked with blood.

  “Oh, Ella, honey. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I thought you’d been around a little.”

  He brought me a wet towel, and wiped gently between my legs. As he did I kissed him and told him I wanted to do it again, but I knew we wouldn’t, beca
use he’d gone groggy and spent.

  “Tell you a little secret,” he said. “This was my first time too. I never did this with a girl before.”

  “Really? Never?”

  Instead of answering, he whispered in my ear. “You saved my life tonight.” Then he fell asleep or passed out in that position, half on top of me, without ever telling me how I did that.

  I figured I’d ask him in the morning, but in the morning his side of the bed was empty. I woke up with the covers on the floor, Shane’s leather jacket over me. When I searched the apartment for him I found only a note.

  It said I should keep the jacket, because he was going home to Phoenix, where it’s too hot anyway, and that I was way too good for him, and I’d figure that out some day.

  I’d been to Phoenix, and I knew it got pretty cold, too, at night. I couldn’t see how anybody could be too good for Shane. “Maybe that was the worst thing I could have done to you, I don’t know. But if you’re sorry it happened, then I’m sorry. But if you’re glad, I’m glad. Look around the apartment, keep anything you can use,” the note ended.

  I carted home everything that belonged to Shane, his left-behind clothes, his safety razor, even the unused bar of soap from his shower. I took the rest of the bottle of Scotch.

  Simon had already gone to school.

  I sat home all day, didn’t go to work, didn’t call, drank most of the Scotch and felt nothing. I tried to remember having felt something the night before, but it seemed I must have dreamed it. Not the event, the feeling of it.

  Just before Simon got home I climbed up a drainpipe onto the roof. I wore Shane’s jeans, too baggy for me, damp in the crotch with leftover blood and semen, and a long, untucked T-shirt, and I stuck my head over the edge and talked to the guys down in the pool.

  “You better get out of there. I’m gonna dive.”

  Most of them said they wouldn’t do that if they were me, but we talked it out, back and forth, until Simon came home with Sarah, and as they came in from the parking lot, I took my stance.